Moving Air Productions

Have there been any updates to this thread? It's frustrating not being able to run those plug-ins that are "mono/stereo" in a stereo channel.

I've had this same problem for years. The 'mono/stereo' plugins USED to work in either form, but they've been strictly mono for many, many years now. Which is frustrating because if you want to run, say a PRS guitar amp sim into the CLA Guitars Stereo plugin, the CLA only sees a left channel coming out of the PRS amp. Very frustrating. I've wanted a fix for this for the better part of a decade now. Never found one. So this is basically a late response with no solution. But at least someone else feels your pain.

So I've been experimenting with this, and I think my mistake was simply not knowing to lock the midi sections once they were in place. I didn't realize that was a thing, and now what I'm doing that, everything seems fine when I set the measures to the video. Rookie mistake. Now I'm going thru the video, re-setting everything to where it should be, and locking it. I don't seem to be having issues with midi stretching/collapsing, even using Shift+M. It was setting measures to cuts that was doing all the damage. There doesn't seem to be much info out there about using the Shift+M feature. It's super handy for pushing/pulling the tempo to make beat one start right at a specific point, like a video cut. But I didn't know how it would completely affect everything if your existing audio/midi wasn't locked in place first. Again, rookie mistakes. Thanks everyone for your input.

Don't take it negatively. I was literally saying that, if you have more experience working with long-form videos, I would love some advice. I'm new to it and there has to be a better way than what I'm doing. I did not mean it in a pissy way.

Yes. I've had to rebuild this film twice now because of issues from adjusting tempos. I'm currently going thru it, rebuilding everything, and once something is fixed, setting it to "absolute" time base and locking it's position and data. I'm hoping beyond hope that this is a work-around for my issue. Do you do much with 1+ hour film editing using the tempo map to match measures and cuts, Bdickens? If so, I'd love any additional pointers on this, because I've wasted two days on fixing what's gotten screwed up.

I'm working on scoring an indie film right now, and I'm having MAJOR problems doing it in my favorite DAW, Cakewalk. The biggest issue I'm running into is the fact that, no matter what I do, if I add a tempo change marker later in the film, using only "jumps" from tempo marker to tempo marker, it still moves everything in front of that marker around. It SHOULDN'T: I mean, If I change a tempo marker at the 50 minute marker, why the hell should it affect things up at the 40 minute point, right? But yet it does. BADLY. I tried setting everything to absolute time, which worked great for any real audio tracks, but it destroyed the MIDI tracks. It would move them, condense or extend the tracks, etc. And even if it didn't move the track, it would usually knock the MIDI out of time, so I would have to stretch and/or re-quantize. So I would get close to the end of the film, and have to go back and basically rebuild and realign the entire film. And if I leave things set to a 'musical' time base, it's even worse, because then all the audio shifts around as well. I like the idea of using the Shift+M feature to align my measures to match cuts in the scene. Seems like an extremely practical feature, right? And, the way I see it, that should only affect as far back as the tempo of the previous marker; making the previous tempo marker faster or slower to adapt that number of measures to fit that amount of time, right? But if I change the tempo, it will move markers, sometimes going all the way back to the beginning of the film. And - again - shift parts well ahead of where I'm working. So it's work, back-track to fix what Cakewalk has screwed up, work, backtrack, work, backtrack, and on and on. So I'm PLEADING with the powers that be at Cakewalk: PLEASE fix the system so that: 1. Adding a tempo change or using Shift+M to move the beat of a measure does not affect ANYTHING before the previous tempo marker. 2. Protect MIDI tracks from shifting, stretching, and/or collapsing when tempos are changed, so nothing has to be rebuilt at the 30 minute mark because tempo changes were made at the 60 minute mark. Adding a tempo change should ONLY affect what comes after it, not before. And using Shift+M to shift the start of a measure to fit a cut should ONLY affect things up to the previous tempo marker. There are other things I'd love to see as well (better video display, a faster way to find what you're looking for when you have a ton of tracks and you're scrolling through all the vertical files, and BETTER ZOOM FOCUS. If I've selected a track and use Ctrl+up/down to zoom in, STAY FOCUSED ON THE SELECTED TRACK!!), but these are the biggest things wasting massive amounts of my time right now.

Is there any way to move multiple markers at the same time? I'm working on a film score, and I had everything marked out, then they sent me a re-cut version, and I have to shift everything. I'm doing it manually, but some of the changes were substantial, and my markers are nowhere near where they should be. Is there a way to grab multiple markers and drag them to a new part of the timeline?

I agree, Base 57. Two major areas where I think Cakewalk could accellerate and make a dent is: 1. Create a more flexible workflow for movie people that would involve being able to treat a timeline like, as you say, a roll of tape. So you can add/modify any part as an individual section, rather than as part of a singular whole. That, and improving video sync, would give them a foot in the door for audio-for-film people. And, 2. Improving the Cakewalk "Jukebox" feature, which almost no one remembers anymore, for live performances. It was a brilliant process that gave them the ability to compete with other popular live tracks software, like Ableton. Back in my live production days, I set up an entire show using Jukebox. Every song contained the backing tracks, video, and MIDI for lighting. And the best part is the drummer could fire off every song using a basic MIDI trigger. But they stopped developing this powerful feature for whatever reason. But if they worked on this, that would put them in a strong position for touring acts who travel with their own backing tracks. I'd love to see either one of those areas improved, and I think Cakewalk could expand it's fan base.

That's really really helpful, msmcleod! I had no idea that lock was in there. Between that and finding the way to lock the markers to absolute time as well, this has been EXTREMELY helpful. However, I do still wish I could arbetrarily set measure starts. If a hard transition happens at timecode 01:08:33:00 (the one I happen to be looking at), it would be amazing to set that as beat one of however many measures. Set the tempo for that section, and record.

So I've been working on a movie, and I know I'm new to it and maybe there's a better way to do it, but I've been bouncing around, scoring it a scene at a time, out of order. And my biggest issue is that I would like to be able to set the tempo for one song and have everything I do "lock" in place. So if I work on something ahead of it, changing the tempo map won't affect what I've already done. Right now, if I change the tempo somewhere, it pushes or pulls everything I've done behind it. So my thinking is: would it be possible to set it up almost like the Arranger view: once I'm done with a scene, I can lock that in place. So if I do scene five, for example, then I go back and do scene three, and decide to jack the tempo for scene by 50 BPM, it will not do anything to any of the scenes following it. So it's almost like the measure numbers wouldn't be counted. They would all be just downbeat indicators. I can see it in my head, but I'm having a difficult time putting it into words. It's like locking sections of audio to the time code instead of to measures. So if sequence three starts at the 15-minute mark, then it doesn't matter what you change ahead of it, the audio for sequence three will start at the 15-minute mark. Does that make sense? Also, the ability to set starting measures arbitrarily would be fantastic. Because trying to take someone's pre-edited film and have the 1 land exactly at the start of a scene cut... Well, it's an ugly proposition. To be able to set the start of a measure the way you can currently set a marker would be AMAZING. For people working in a non-linear fashion like this, that would actually be really handy. Right now I would either have to do everything from the beginning, in a linear fashion, in order to avoid problems changing the tempo map, or else I just cannot use any time-based effects or samples.

I know video production isn't Cakewalk's bread-and-butter, but since the functionality is here, I'm trying to use it to score some video work. I'm running into a couple of issues that I would like to know if they could be addressed by the team: 1. The video thumbnails do not seem to properly align with the video. They seem to be off by quite a bit, actually. It would be great if that could be tightened up. 2. Automation points seem to slide around in relation to the video sometimes. This is a harder issue to pin down, but I can set automation to match a transition in the video, then next time I open the project, it has shifted by a noticable degree. Maybe this is more an issue of the video shifting as opposed to the automation? 3. This is the big one: I would LOVE it if there was an option where I did not have to re-encode the video when I export. There should be a setting where it just takes the video AS ALREADY ENCODED and replaces the audio. There are other video encoders out there like Avidemux that can do this, and it would be a MASSIVE time saver for scoring.

When is the next iteration of Cakewalk coming out? Because running 2021.12, Cakewalk crashes ALL the time now. I've been trying to work on simple podcast projects for the last several days, and it's been crashing about 5-6 times a day. This is a new phenomena that I am not at all partial to. Today, it's crashed twice in the last 20 minutes and all I was doing was attempting to change the panning on the tracks.

I've noticed that, for a while now, if you have audio in your project that has been manually stretched (either by using the transient sliders or just using the SHIFT + CRTL keys to drag an audio track), if you try to export the project as an audio file, the stretched audio does not automatically process anymore and does not end up in the exported track. It's just silence where the stretched audio should be. So it forces you to bake whatever changes you've made permanently into the tracks. This isn't helpful if you're just experimenting with some ideas and don't want to commit to something or play the CRTL +Z game all the time, running the risk of mindlessly saving your project just out of habit. Can it go back to the way it was on this?

A lot of interesting options here. And while they all have their place, I just want a "What you hear is what you get" option, where I don't have to worry about "did I leave a track highlighted accidentally?" or anything like that. While there are plenty of uses and situations where you could want ONLY that section run thru the meat grinder, for me, those times are much fewer and farther between than just "mix is done. squash it out."

That's really good to know. Thank you. I would still like to see it integrated into the "Save As..." menu. Just have a checkbox that says "Save workspace with template" or something like that. Or a side list similar to the Export page: A list of check boxes. It can be "Save with template: Workspace, Bit rate," etc. That's all.